


THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE

by Jacqueline_64



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Anxiety, Coma, Critical injuries, Episode Related, Episode: s04e22 Sweet Revenge, Fear, Gen, Missing Scenes, Mourning, Not Beta Read, Shock, Trauma, Uncertainty, life and death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26936707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacqueline_64/pseuds/Jacqueline_64
Summary: Hutch's anxiety from the moment of the shooting until Starsky wakes up from his coma.
Kudos: 20





	THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Although not a part of my post Sweet Revenge, post Gunther Sessions, Roller Coaster series, I do use those series as point of reference for this story, by which I mean that any literary liberties/licenses I take in this story are the same as in the stories in those series.  
> 2\. Inspiration for this story is a scene in The Journey, chapter 9 “The first cracks in the white knight’s armor”.

The most used disclaimer:   
The TV show "Starsky and Hutch", and the characters from it   
are the property of the persons who hold the copyrights   
and other legal rights to them.   
This story is a work of fiction, written for pleasure only   
and not for profit. It is not intended, in any way,   
to infringe on these preexisting copyrights.

# THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE

Jacqueline©2020-10-10

He’d been running on empty on the one hand and adrenaline and a desire for justice and perhaps even revenge on the other hand. Ever since that fateful moment, now exactly fifteen days ago. The moment that changed his life, **their** lives, forever. The moment that almost took his best friend, his partner against crime, away from him.

That moment had split him into countless pieces, in multiple ways. One minute he was alert, pumped with adrenaline, shooting at the attackers as they raced away in a black and white patrol car. Calling, no screaming at his partner to get down, out of the line of fire. Perhaps he’d screamed Starsky’s name not just to warn him, but also to overrule that tiny inner voice that told him that there was no way that Starsky would be able to escape the rapid machine gunfire. That Starsky virtually had no chance to survive such a brutal assault.

The next minute, his own heart had almost stopped at the sight he encountered once he’d rounded the Torino. There lay Starsky, in a fetal position, head resting against the rear tire on the driver’s side. Light blue eyes rolling back in their sockets. Uncontrolled shivering motions as the blood left his body. And Hutch?

Hutch had stood motionless, externally solid as a statue, but inside his heart and soul had shattered into millions of pieces. At that moment, time stopped, sounds disappeared, everybody around him seemed to move in slow motion. Oddly enough, he could hear his own heart beating frantically in his head, in a fast but steady rhythm. And at the same time, as he witnessed the struggle between life and death that had Starsky in its grip, he could also hear his partner’s irregular, halting, rattling, shallow breaths as if he were breathing straight into Hutch’s ears.

Hutch had seen Starsky injured before. He’d experienced multiple times the unfocused gaze of his partner’s light blue eyes after a bullet had hit him, or when he was fighting a deadly poison, or just after he’d come to after a blow on his head. But never before had he seen the death roll in Starsky’s eyes. Never before had he witnessed the departure of what made Starsky who he was. Never before had he witnessed the light in those eyes go dim.

He didn’t remember much of the past two weeks. It was like he was slipping in and out of consciousness. He lost track of time, but never of urgency. Not even at the moments when he was looking into somebody’s face, for instance, Huggy’s or even Captain Dobey’s, and could see their lips moving but somehow could not hear what they were saying. Still, he did hear his own voice answering them, so somehow some parts of him operated separately and convincingly, even though the biggest parts of him – his heart and soul – were numbed and sucked into a vacuum ever since Starsky got shot.

He functioned on automatic pilot. A seasoned cop, one of the best at age 36, excelling at his job had become second nature. Another piece of all those pieces that had separated and fallen apart. His physical form was the only thing that kept all fragments of his being together, but he was shattered inside. One piece, the cop’s brain inside him, was working overtime. Another piece, the best friend, was numb and in a state of pre-mourning. Still another piece was bent on revenge. But one thing all these pieces had in common: they had to stay busy, or else they’d not just be shattered, but crushed beyond repair.

And so he had functioned on adrenaline, instinct, and need for justice and vengeance during the hours he did not sit at his dying partner’s bedside. First to prevent a second assassination attempt on Starsky at the hospital, not even a full 24 hours after the shooting at the parking lot of Metro. After nipping a third attempt in the bud at the hospital garage, all his senses and emotions went into overdrive and he had functioned as a man possessed. Like a desperado with nothing to lose to find out who was behind the attacks. Like a bull in the arena going for the Matador’s red cape, only he had no clue who the Matador was.

After finding the first links that might lead to the solution, the brief phone conversation with his captain had caused a few more pieces of his heart to shatter even more. During his manic drive to the hospital, where doctors fought frantically to restore Starsky’s heart to a normal rhythm, he had cursed, yelled, cried, hit the car horn frantically accompanying the blaring siren and the mars light on the vehicle’s roof.

The way he drove, he could have caused a deadly accident, cutting the time it normally took to get to the hospital in half, but he didn’t. He could have caused his own heart to arrest, the way he’d run like a madman, inside the hospital, not waiting for elevators but taking the stairs 6 floors up to Starsky’s ICU room. But he survived and had stood there, breath wheezing out of control, heart racing at perhaps 300 beats per minute, hearing the best news since this nightmare had begun: Starsky was still alive. He had spent as much time as possible at his partner’s bedside the rest of that afternoon into the early evening when Captain Dobey had urged him to go home and get some rest.

He’d left the hospital reluctantly. And although he absolutely needed to rest and recharge to continue investigating the assassination attempts on his partner, he could not. The quiet of his apartment was deafening. Echoes of sounds of the hours that had passed rang around in his head. The sharpness of the rapid machine-gun fire, the screeching of tires, the frantic voices of police and ambulance personnel. Images that were all a blur, except for those of Starsky. Somehow all memories of Starsky from yesterday were perfect in their horror. Rolling eyes, splatters, and pools of blood, the color draining from his face. It haunted Hutch for most of the evening and night, granting him only three hours of restless sleep at most.

The next days he had battled on, not just in his search for those who had ordered the hit on Starsky, but also to stay awake, alert and vigilant. To keep his brain functioning and able to draw the right conclusions. To listen to his inner voice, his instinct. Even to just be able to stay vertical as his body’s demands for rest and recuperation became louder and louder. He had been close to losing that battle when a miracle occurred: 56 hours after surgery to save his life, Starsky had woken up from the coma.

Hutch instantly was freed of fatigue and pain when for the first time in almost 3 days he had eye contact with his partner. Reinvigorated, he was able to drive himself even harder towards the finish line: the arrest of James Marshall Gunther, the man responsible not just for one of the biggest criminal organizations in the USA and across the globe, but also the one responsible for the multiple attacks on Starsky’s life.

And after that? After that, Hutch had been only just able to keep his mind together enough to do all the paperwork in preparation for the investigation by the DA. But his energy had left him because the goal had been reached. Gunther was in custody, as were many of his associates, so there was no more need for adrenaline. And with the adrenaline gone, Hutch had felt tired like never before. And hopeless like never before because, although Starsky was officially out of his coma, he was hardly communicative.

Hutch had alternated working at the station on the case with sitting at Starsky’s bedside at the hospital. Sometimes he’d walk into the room and be welcomed by Starsky’s smile. That would cheer him up momentarily until he remembered what the neurologist had told him; that Starsky’s smiles were more a reflex than a deliberate action. And he realized that the moment he’d scrutinize the look in his partner’s eyes as he smiled. Hutch himself had described it to Captain Dobey as “The eyes are open, but nobody’s home yet.”

And just as Hutch was getting used to the tediously slow, but steady, early beginnings of recuperation of his partner, he had been slapped back into the harsh reality of what was now Starsky’s new normal: fragility. To fight off a respiratory infection, the hospital staff had to put Starsky under sedation again. And so, one week after waking up from the coma, Starsky’s eyes were closed again as his condition took a turn for the worse.

Four more days, Hutch was not able to look into his partner’s eyes. Four more days of not being able to find a sign of recognition, of awareness, of depth. During those 4 days, Hutch had found himself crying, secretly to himself, when nobody was watching. In his car on the way home. At the precinct in the men’s room, in his apartment, his greenhouse, his bed. He’d cry silent, hopeless, tears. Tears of fear, anger, regret. Cursing himself for mistakes he felt he’d made in his friendship with Starsky. Cursing himself for having been so callous about their friendship at times. Going over his partner’s life and his own life, going back and forth in a “could have, would have, should have” marathon of endless thoughts that tumbled through his mind. And putting on a brave face each time he had to function again in the real world, that just kept turning as if nothing had happened.

But yesterday, Starsky’d been taken off sedation, and soon his eyes had opened again. And this time, the look in his eyes seemed different to Hutch. And so did the first smile Starsky had given him a few hours after having woken up for the second time since the shooting. To Hutch, it felt like Starsky was truly coming back again. Still, he was afraid to get his hopes up too high as he returned home after having spent the majority of the day at Starsky’s bedside. Yet, it was the first night in a long time that he had slept all the way through the night. It had also been the first night that tears of fear, anger, and regret had not bubbled up out of nowhere.

And now, he was on his way to Starsky’s room, the way he’d started every day after the arrest of Gunther. The hospital’s doormen knew him by heart now and tipped their hat at him as if he were an old friend. The receptionists, too, greeted him with warm smiles and friendly nods of their heads. The individual members of the substantial medical team that guarded Starsky and cared for him around the clock, were also more than familiar with Hutch and with Captain Dobey and Huggy for that matter. But, now that Gunther was in custody, the make-shift police post at the hospital was no longer there and Hutch was the only one who visited Starsky with a daily frequency. Most of the time, even more than once a day.

Tomorrow, Starsky’s mother would fly in for a first visit since the shooting. Starsky had made Hutch promise early into their partnership that, should anything devastating happen to him, he would make sure that Rachel Starsky would be spared having to see her son at his worst. And Hutch had kept that promise and a date had been set for her visit. Starsky’s respiratory infection had been cured just in time for him to look as presentable as possible. Hutch only wished that his partner’s cognitive and communicative ability would have improved enough by now to not be a reason for concern for Starsky’s mother.

As he walked into the, now familiar, ICU room, he immediately noticed that Starsky’s pillows were a little higher than usual, slightly elevating his partner’s head.  
He smiled at his partner, picked up a newspaper from the bedstand, and grabbed the visitor’s chair to pull it closer to Starsky’s bed.

“Hey, Hutch!” a soft, but distinct, slightly raspy, sound filled the quiet room and stopped Hutch in his tracks.

He looked at his partner’s face. For the first time since the shooting, he found Starsky’s essence in his smile and eyes.

And as a tear slid down his cheek he smiled at his partner, and whispered, equally softly  
“Hey, buddy. Welcome back!”


End file.
